Eleven Firms Tendered Bids for Condos Elevators

The tender was initially floated by the Saving Houses Development Enterprise three years ago

One of the housing units being built for middle-income hosing schemes at 24 kebele, along the way to Kokeb Building. Eleven companies have submitted bids to supply 338 elevators for these and other public buildings throughout Addis Abeba.

Eleven companies are competing to supply 338 elevators for middle-income housing units. This tender is the third attempt by the city administration after the cancellation of two earlier bids.

The initial tender, floated three years ago, was cancelled after the Addis Abeba Saving Houses Development Enterprise, the lead agency, determined that none of the bidders had passed the technical evaluation stage. The second attempt collapsed after one of the bidders, Dan Lift Technology, protested that the CE Certificate, a European conformity requirement that companies were asked to present, does not apply in Ethiopia.

The city’s Finance & Economic Cooperation Bureau intervened and cancelled the bid. The Bureau also handed over the procurement to the Addis Abeba Public Procurement & Property Disposal Agency, which held the bid opening last Wednesday, August 8 at the agency’s office.

The cost of the project is estimated to be about 400 million Br. Five foreign and six local companies have submitted bids along with their technical and financial documents. There were 48 companies that initially expressed interest.

The elevators will be procured for high rises between seven and 18-storeys and will be allocated in seven different lots. Not all companies competed for all lots. The number of elevators in each of the seven lots ranges from two to 144.

Tsemex competed for six lots; Hengda for one lot; Dan for two; and ITECH competed for five lots. The remaining seven companies made offers for all the lots.

During last week’s bid opening meeting, a complaint was raised by the representative of Kebede Gebremichael Electromechanical, who claimed that the five companies, China Communications, Sintec Ethiopia, Racrob, Dan and Hengda Fuji should be disqualified from the bid, because they had not submitted samples a day before the bid opening.

The representative tried to convince the agency, recalling his experience when his company was disqualified from last year’s tender of the same bid as a result of submitting samples late to the enterprise. He also referred to an article in the Standard Bidding Document for procurement of goods and services for International Competitive Biddings, which makes it obligatory to present samples in a ‘timely manner’.

The tender committee said that a complaint must be written and submitted for the agency to deliberate on it, based on the procurement law of the country.

“It is an administrative issue and will be handled according to the procurement law of the nation,” said Abdulkadir Redwan, deputy manager for the procurement sector at the agency.

“Bidders have no right to ask for the disqualification of others, as long as they bought the bidding document and submitted their technical and financial documents before closing time.”

The agency is procuring the elevators on behalf of the enterprise, which has been busy constructing 38,000 middle-income housing units in 371 buildings since 2013.

Last year in August, the enterprise for the first time in its history transferred 876 housing units in 17 buildings in the Senga Tera and Crown sites. There are 160,000 home seekers that are waiting to receive homes from the enterprise.

Habtamu Berhanu (PhD), a lecturer at Addis Abeba University’s College of Business & Economics for more than a decade, stresses that the conflict resolution method must be done by the book and solved procedurally.

“The bidding document should avoid vague articles as they are subject to manipulation and cause conflicts,” he said. “The history of the previous tender should also not affect another if the committee presents credible causation.”

The result of the technical evaluation will be announced within a month, according to Atnafu Abebe, director of procurement section at the agency.